Mark Zuckerberg: preference

Transcript context

…Actually, can you take us back and we want to ask you the story of that time. It seems quaint now, Friendster, Myspace, but you studied computer science, graph networking, social graphs. That is a very, very difficult computational calculation. I think it's a combination of a product question and a technology question. I think you can define the product in such a general way that the technology becomes basically impossible to solve. You want to have a smart product definition, but then you want to be competent and better than everyone else at the technology. I think that that's something that we've held ourselves to and built a good organization around, and it's one of the things that I observed as soon as I came out to the Valley, that all these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. The companies I was talking about, it's like the CEO wasn't technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it. They had one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering, who was technical, and everyone else wasn't. All right, if that's your team, then you're not a technology company. I think one of the things that I've always been pretty careful about is I actually want a lot of the people on our management team, it's like split mostly people running either these big product groups who come up through different technical pathways of the company, and I think that there's like a balance. You don't want everyone to be an engineer because there's other things that matter too. But if you don't have enough of your share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company. I think that that also is important to the board. I think just like in terms of how you weigh decisions and culturally, things inside the company matters a lot. But I think that's one of the things that has been really fundamental. We're able to go from platform to platform and do these different things because we've invested and cared about the underlying technology. The product experiences that we build on top of that are an implementation and they matter. For that, I think we also are a pretty curious and learning-focused organization where I view the product strategy less as any one specific thing and more as how do we iterate and learn as quickly as possible how to make each thing better for the people we're trying to serve. I define our strategies. We can learn faster than every other company. We're going to win. We're going to build a better product than everyone else because we're going to get it out first or early. We're going to have a good feedback loop. We're going to get a bunch of feedback. We're going to learn what people like better than other people. By the time you get to whether it's version three or four or five—they're not even discrete versions because you ship so frequently—you just learn faster. I think that's basically the formula. Be a technology company, build good foundation, learn from what people are focused on in the world, and just iterate as quickly as you can. In one of my research calls to prep for this, someone described you as a master strategist, which we all acknowledge at this point.…

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